Feeling all gassy? Search neutral.

Does everyone still remember the Hunger Site? You know, that website where if you just clicked a big button on their main page you would give food to hungry children? The site has expanded to included several other charities - breast cancer, animal rescue, child health, literacy, the rain forest - but the principal is the same. You go to their site, click, and advertising sponsors pay for a small donation towards your cause. It’s win win win win win. Kids get food, you feel good and big companies get some seriously feel good press.

Well there’s a new kid on the web with a similar strategy, except focusing instead on carbon emissions. The site is Carbon Neutral Search. In essence, the team will buy carbon offsets equivalent to the emissions generated by an average Google search, which by their reserach is about 17.5 grams. They calculated this figure in two parts; first the amount of energy used by Google servers for your average search (.0044 grams CO2) plus the energy used by your typical computer during the roughly 15 minutes it takes to search and review results, they say.

For every search (it’s powered by the Google custom search), they buy 100 grams worth of carbon offsets..yes, that’s exceeding the 17.5 grams you actually used, but hey, they are just generous like that (or carbon credits aren’t costly enough, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms).

I emailed the developer of the site, Gareth Davis for some of the particulars above. If you go to the search home page, you’ll see that it has a distincly dark color scheme and Davis was indeed inspired by Blackle (Katie blogged about it previously). Blackle is a Google-clone search site just like Davis’s that uses a black background to reduce the energy requirements of computer displays thereby saving energy/carbon. Davis figures that Blackle gets about 800,000 search per week, but the ad dollars don’t go to the cause.

Hence his desire to start up Carbon Neutral Search. It’s not the catchiest name, and not the prettiest site, but the search seems solid (no crappy Yahoo search here) and why not? I mean really?

Now it’s all about habit breaking - changing bookmarks, homepages, and not typing in that oh so easy http://www.google.com (who are going carbon netural themselves, see). Davis is hoping to develop a browswer toolbar application shortly, which would be great because that is where I enter 80% of my searches.